Mobility is crucial to modern organizations, and thus growing exponentially. Various estimates indicate that there will soon be approximately 100 million mobile devices in corporate environments. However, mobility challenges the IT departments of companies in their use of corporate resources. Mobile workers desire the same access to data as traditional workers, both when present physically within the corporate premises (through wired/wireless corporate networks), as well as from public access points like wireless hot spots, etc
Mobility brings forth new challenges, both in managing portable devices like laptops from a security standpoint as well as protecting valuable data in laptops in the event of data loss/thefts. Traditional approaches to backups have included manual backups which are entirely on the owner's prerogative, and providing for backups with additional writeable media. These methods are not reliable, and possible theft of such media will exacerbate the condition. In addition, mobile users are usually connected to a corporate network irregularly and infrequently. Such connections could also be via low bandwidth dial up networks, or corporate/public wireless access points.